In 1995, the World Wide Web was 2 years old, and a Pew Research Center survey found that just 3 percent of all Americans had ever used it. Some 4 percent of Americans read news online via the Web, bulletin boards and other means at least once a week, but the vast majority of those told surveyors it had not affected their reliance on traditional news sources.

Internet use had doubled from the year before, but most Americans did not see the service as "essential" to their lives.

But even then, there were those who saw the potential.

Three years before, Knight-Ridder, which owned the Daily Camera at the time, started the Knight-Ridder Information Design Lab in downtown Boulder. A team of journalists, designers and technologists looked into the future and foresaw the revolution that would overtake print journalism

"It may be difficult to conceptualize the idea of digital paper, but in fact we believe that is what is going to happen," Fidler says in the video, which has resurfaced on YouTube, a platform that wouldn't exist for another 10 years at the time Fidler described a 2-pound, handheld computer that would allow readers to use interactive graphics and watch videos alongside the articles they had always read. Ads also would be interactive and tailored to readers' interests and consumer habits.

Bruce Henderson, a longtime editor at the Daily Camera, had left the newsroom to teach at the University of Colorado's journalism school before the Camera Website launched. At CU, he brought the student newspaper — the Campus Press — online in 1994, at a time when barely more than 100 newspapers in the world had Websites.

The real revolution, in Henderson's view, didn't come, though, until the popularization of mobile devices, which allowed readers to access information anywhere, at any time. That was the future Fidler envisioned with his tablet newspaper.

Screen capture of DailyCamera.com in 2005 (YouTube)

Henderson recalled the first time he saw a demonstration of the multimedia potential of an online newspaper.

"It had headlines and text and photos and videos," he said. "And I thought, 'Boy, that's it. This is going to change everything.' And it did."

The Daily Camera went online in October 1996 as BoulderNews.com. At that time, newspapers were advised to use a domain name that reflected the community they covered and not necessarily one that matched the newspaper name. Another owner also was "squatting" on DailyCamera.com, and the Camera wouldn't own that name for years to come.

The Camera launched BuffZone.com, focusing on University of Colorado sports, in 1998 and experimented over the years with a variety of specialized online publications, from BoulderAtNight.com for entertainment and nightlife to MyTown.com for citizen-generated content.

In the early years, though, the Internet did more to change reporting than it did to change the experience for users. Journalists filed their stories as they always had, and the Website was updated once a day.

Screen capture of DailyCamera.com as it appears today. (YouTube)

"We were still treating the Website as a function of the daily newspaper," said Jason Gewirtz, a reporter at the Daily Camera from 1996 to 2000, as he recalled the early days of online journalism. "It was just a weird computer version of the newspaper. It took a while for people to realize this was something people could check anytime of the day and not just when it arrives on your doorstep in the morning.

In the mid-1990s, there was one computer in the Camera newsroom that had Internet access, and reporters had to take turns using it for research. Gewirtz recalled how exciting it was when each reporter got their own computer with Internet access at his or her desk.

The Camera employed a librarian, and the newspaper had its own reference section and archives, where paper clippings were kept in files organized by keyword.

"There was a copy of the World Almanac on the city desk, and the rule was that it did not leave the city desk because it was one of the most important reference books we had," Gewirtz said.

Reporters quickly realized the research potential of this new tool, the Internet. When a 15-year-old student from Brazil killed another teenager from South Korea in a car accident at the McDonald's on Baseline Road, Gewirtz and his colleagues were able to learn about the communities these young people came from, and how the news was being covered in their home countries via the Internet.

"We did a long feature that looked at who both these kids were, and it was the type of story where I don't know how we could have gotten the information about where they came from, what their neighborhoods were like, without the Internet."

The Daily Camera moved its digital team into the newsroom in the late 1990s at a time when many newspapers kept them nearly as separate as news and advertising. That partnership contributed to the evolution of the online Camera.

It was also in tragedy that newspapers realized the potential of the Internet to keep readers informed of breaking news. During and after the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, the Daily Camera Website was continuously updated with news reporting, photo galleries, polls, and audio and video of what was then the worst school shooting in U.S. history.

In 2000, the Daily Camera won an EPpy Award, at the time the highest honor in online journalism, for Best Special Section for its Columbine coverage in competition with newspapers and online publications from all over the world.

The Columbine coverage propelled the Camera into the digital age. Live online coverage with frequent updates became the hallmark of how the newspaper covers wildfires, floods, important trials and elections.

Jennifer Sammons describes her time as online editor of the Daily Camera in the mid-2000s as a "heyday" of experimentation and innovation. The Camera had an online staff of four that attended morning and afternoon news meetings and came up with multimedia projects that would complement the print edition, as well as pursuing projects of their own.

"We started doing more video and audio and beefing up content that was in the paper with multimedia, and then we started doing more breaking news and posting more stuff during the day," she said.

At the same time, getting content online wasn't always the smoothest process. Online editors spent a lot of time in the middle of the night fixing glitches in code and manually attaching photos and headlines to stories on the Website.

Sammons also helped launch community sites for the Camera and recruit local bloggers.

"It was a time that we were really big on community journalism, and we were going to have citizen reporters out there," she said. "One of the reasons we did that was that with the content management system we had, this was the best way for people to get things to us. Social media was not what it is now."

Today, the online newspaper is an equal or greater partner with the print edition, and reporters file stories directly to the Website as soon as they are ready, or even earlier, and then update them throughout the day.

Reporters and editors start updating the Website with weather and news at 6 a.m. and continue to post throughout the day with breaking news and early versions of important stories that also are broadcast via social media. When city meetings go late or breaking news occurs too late for the print deadline, reporters update the Website so that readers have the most up-to-date information.

"It's changed the timeline of what we have to do," said Mitchell Byars, the Camera's early-morning reporter who covers police, courts and breaking news. "We have to be thinking about what we can post right now and not what the story will look like by the end of the day. We have to get people information as quickly as we can."

During the September 2013 floods, reporters and editors staffed the newsroom 24 hours a day and updated the Website through the night with stories, photos, video, road closures, evacuations and other important information. They also used Twitter and Facebook to share information even more quickly than the Website allows and to respond to personal questions.

"You have to be able to interact with people on social media because you can't answer every question in a story," Byars said. "If specific routes or blocks are affected, you can get that information to people. It's like a personalized news feed.

"During the flood, I was helping people get home more than I was writing stories," he added.

For that September, daily
camera.com recorded almost 13 million page views, more than four times the site's typical Web traffic, and had 1.5 million unique visitors, more than double the normal number.

Stories also come into the Daily Camera via social media. Reporters learned that two Boulder police officers had shot an elk illegally on Mapleton Hill when a resident tweeted a photo, and that photo evidence led reporters to press for answers when dispatchers said the shooting hadn't happened.

Specialized content for the Website and a strong social media presence are now a standard part of the Daily Camera's news operations. Stories come with photo galleries and videos, interactive maps and audio files. Reporters live-tweet events and meetings and post raw data for readers. The newspaper hosts live chats and streams video of events. The Daily Camera has done podcasts and developed its own apps.

The Camera also got into the music video arena, inviting local bands into a newsroom recording studio and produced music videos and interviews via SecondStoryGarage.com.

The Daily Camera reaches more readers today and in more parts of the world than at any time in its 125-year history. With the desktop and mobile versions of the online newspaper, the Daily Camera seeks to realize the vision laid out by Fidler more than 20 years ago:

"There are many people who believe that newspapers are dinosaurs and that they're going to become the roadkill on the information superhighway in the not-too-distant future," he said. "We believe exactly the opposite. We believe that newspapers in fact can evolve into a new form of media that blends the old familiar aspects of the newspaper with the new technologies that are emerging."

The Daily Camera launched its niche music video Website, SecondStoryGarage.com in 2012. (YouTube)